I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days...

I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days. My hair is a long knot behind my back. There is a red blemish on my left cheek. It looks distinguished there so I leave it. I rearrange the photos of my mother atop my grandmother's old piano, the photos of her as a child, a teenager. Here she stands between her two brothers, her hair red and huge about her. Here she is dressed as a child in a catholic school uniform, my mother, she wears a tie. At home she is wearing eyeglasses, thick black pointed rims. I've heard her recall them so many times. In the photography rooms she can see without them, she can smile half-way. Then beside and in front of her, I've placed a new favorite. I call her the nun. She is a nun. I never knew this woman, this nun of my family. I thank her, I love her for that. She was not a cheerful woman, said my mother. But she is such a wonderful photo, sitting on the right in a white and wooden chair, the most joyfully spectacled woman beside her. Another woman I do not know sits beside her. She is holding a baby in her lap. She is wearing a pink or a faded red dress and sitting with this nun on someone's lawn. A tree fills the whole frame behind her. She is so lovely in her pink, with her baby and her nun. And I don't give a damn who she is.

to the piano teacher

love is a shelf where i've kept you preserved,
next to a sign which says please
do not touch.

i applied to be your piano teacher
and you taught me to play the piano.

we said little of the time apart.

we said little as we described the shape
of the large, white elephants we could never name &
still, i did not feel we were lying.

but you would leave me

in this house with too many rooms
while everyone around me left for work.

while i stayed home.
i played your piano & no one would hire me
to play your piano.

no one would tell me the chords.
i would ask them the names of the chords, i would tell them
i quit guitar to hide my lonely palms.

i would press you into the long white keys.